The parallels are obvious. How sad but unsurprising that they don’t see them. Chris Hughes, the new owner of the liberal magazine the New Republic, is that magazine’s new Stephen Glass. Glass, of course, is the notorious fabulist who made up, then published, at least three dozen fake stories in the New Republic in the late 1990s. Glass got away with it because he was surrounded by fellow journalists who cared more about looking hip and cool than the truth.

So, how is the first issue under Hughes just like a guy who made up a couple dozen articles out of whole cloth? Because 1)Hughes published a measured article about the Republican Party by known Trotskyite Sam Tanenhaus and 2)Ann Coulter and Marty Peretz disagreed with it. That’s the argument, I swear. Also Judge is very upset that Dave Weigel would bring his phoney-baloney “circulation figures” to a discussion about how Marty Peretz destroyed the magazine he purchased with his wife’s money, rather than answering Peretz’s silly criticisms of the Tanenhaus article.

“Bryce Harper, the first player in major league history to try to stretch a single into a double …”

I don’t think he claimed that Bryce Harper was the first player to do this. It’s just that Harper does it for the RIGHT reasons – for the team, as opposed to those blah players who do it to pad their stats. You can tell the difference just by looking at them – I mean, um …

i feel i must defend mr. harper. it isn’t his fault that a pathetic douchebag has made him the object of his warped, ideological desire, and i suspect it would creep him out if he knew. he (harper) seems like a nice enough young man, who enjoys playing baseball, and is trying, diligently, to be the best he can at it, through hard work, not family connections. if anything, that makes him a progressive democrat, but i have no clue what his politics are, if he even has any.

Hughes seems like a decent-enough guy for someone with his level of money and power. A decade ago, when he was a college freshman, he actually spent a year volunteering at one of the same social justice orgs that I volunteer at now, and there’s a volunteer I’m regularly on shift with who remembers showing him the ropes way back when. And he’s involved in some good causes now. I have some hope for TNR under him.

America’s Dumbest Pundit is a tall order given the stiff competition, but this is indeed a fine entry.

It must be tough to accept a job from Tucker, because in that moment, if you’ve got any brains at all, ya gotta realize that there’s nowhere else for you to go to when you feck-up again – you have just hit rock-bottom.

But then, if you had any brains at all, you wouldn’t be in the position of having to take a job from Tucker, so I guess there’s no degree of self-awareness going on anyway.

Come now, this isn’t true at all. We all know there are any number of really bad right-wing publications one can find a job at. A few cocktails with the right person, and you can be climbing the loon ladder once again.

You know Tucker’s staff is valuable, because they make money. And money of course is the ultimate indicator of skill, as capitalism is completely merit based.

Yes, you can try to comfort yourself by repeating that Breitbart is dead. But in squalid temples that stretch from Wasilla to Louisiana fevered worshipers still cry to the night air “In his house in DC dead Breitbart waits dreaming”.

McCain still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of media complacency which has shielded him since the Vietnam War ended. His accursed campaign is sunken once more, else Bill Kristol wouldn’t call for a restart; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in red states. He must have been trapped by the sinking polls within his black abyss, or else the press would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in his visions of victory, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come – but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

I loved the reference to Jack Shafer as “Mr. Monkeyfishing himself.” I sent a Michael Kinsley column pointing out how much better the economy has done under Democratic presidents than Republicans, with statistics and everything to back the argument up, to a few coworkers after we had had a political discussion.

Within nanoseconds a wingnut coworker had e-mailed me back the monkeyfishing column, I guess as proof that Kinsley’s claims, including the relevant economic numbers, were all bullshit. That was nearly ten years ago.

[…] may remember Mark Judge from various columns in which racism and utter asininity fight to a standstill in a battle the reade…In today’s column, Judge argues that Obama lacks courage, discipline, self-reliance, industry, […]